


Awareness

by orphan_account



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Female Friendship, Married Life, Mind Rape, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Regret
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:14:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23782189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Companion piece to Troublemaker. Slight AU. "I want to know that everything will be all right – that I won't wake up in that rubble, bleeding to death." The war is over, and the Reapers are destroyed. Shepard tries to move on with her life.
Relationships: Female Shepard/Garrus Vakarian
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	Awareness

"Watch that concrete! Hey, easy!"

A crash sounded, and Tali sighed. "Keelah, at this rate I'll be lucky to have a standing house when all is said and done."

Shepard chuckled at that and wiped at the dust on her forehead. More was caked in her black hair, making it appear gray. The construction crew, a collection of quarians and humans, were lifting and lowering pieces of concrete and metal in the process of building Tali's two-story home. Tali currently had her omni-tool out and was looking over the plans of the home. "It's a work in progress, Tali. It'll get there."

"Here's to hoping," Tali off-lined her omni-tool, and sat down in one of the two chairs positioned in her unfinished sitting room, "Thank you for helping with this, Shepard."

"Of course," she replied, taking out her thermos of water for a drink, "This meant much to you. I made time when I could."

Tali shrugged. "I appreciate it, but I don't expect it. Everyone's been busy since the end of the war in this new world."

"Don't I know it," Shepard commented with a shake of her head, "Couldn't get Garrus off Palaven, though he's about had it with the turian military. Once he settles a few other matters with the Primarch Victus, he'll be retired along with me."

"I can't very well blame him," Tali rubbed her wrists against one another, "I do miss when it used to be the three of us together. Though, all things considering, we were lucky to be alive, the last time that we were."

"Do you ever think about it?" Shepard asked, gingerly settling herself into the other chair. She groaned at the soreness of her limbs and shifted about to make herself comfortable.

"At times," Tali replied, looking out of the hole in her house's frame, which the afternoon light peered through, "But I don't like to dwell on it."

Tali suppressed the chill at the memory of Harbinger attempting to indoctrinate her during that final confrontation in the Citadel. She'd felt nothing but contempt for the Illusive Man, in how he had become nothing more than a whining child as a result of his own indoctrination. However, as Harbinger had forcibly invaded her mind, she found that she understood the Illusive Man.

She'd known at first that it wasn't real, but that had quickly dwindled away over the sheer horror of it. She saw the entire quarian fleet burning and heard their screams. She saw herself in her dream house on Rannoch, only for it to be set on fire with herself inside it. She saw Kal'Reegar holding open his arms to embrace her, only for his armor to fall off, and expose a rotted body underneath…The horrors grew upon horrors, until she collapsed under them.

"I don't remember anything past hitting the floor, Shepard, I'm sorry," Tali finalized with a shake of her head, "The next thing I remember is a recovery team loading me onto a bed, and hearing my vitals beeping. I think I also heard someone say 'we found the quarian admiral,' but that couldn't have made sense – I was too damaged to be identified. I was too tired to even crane my neck to see if you and Garrus were still alive."

Shepard nodded, and took a last sip from her thermos. "It adds up."

As she watched her friend put the thermos down, Tali wondered as to whether Shepard truly had felt better about the issue. However, as Shepard swiped the back of her wrist across her mouth, Tali opted to change the subject. "So, what's getting married going to be like, for you?" She asked, "You'll be leaving your name behind."

She chuckled. "If they want to remember me as Shepard, that's fine."

"What about you, though?" Tali inquired, "You're trying to brush off the significance of a name with a quarian."

Shepard smiled self-effacingly. "Sorry. To be honest, I hope it will lead to happiness among civilian life. I want to be someone else, for once." She clasped her hands together. "Rosalind Shepard, as it stands to me as a name, came from a peaceful existence, which was shattered by barbarism. She then became mired in war. I want to leave that behind."

"One could argue that you did when you warned the batarian colony of the arrival of the Reapers," Tali pointed out.

Shepard frowned. "Why?"

Tali spread her hands. "My concern is that you are leaving your name behind only for its negative connotations."

"Can you blame me?"

"I can't say that I do, if you feel that way, but what you need to understand is that those connotations will still remain, and you will have to deal with them."

Shepard frowned at that. "I know. That's going to be difficult, re-entering public life. I've been more used to being in the field. Less bullshit to deal with from people, in general. No wonder Anderson didn't last on the Council."

"I can help you with that," Tali offered, "Being an admiral is as much political as it is military. Not every question can be answered with a shotgun."

Shepard looked embarrassed. "Not to mention that you've probably dealt with worse, since you're new."

"There are a few times that I've wanted to reach across the conference table, and bang Gerrel and Korris's helmets together. Regardless, doing so wouldn't solve anything – one needs to know how to deal with these things."

"You've grown, Tali," Shepard admired.

"The daughter of an admiral shouldn't comport herself otherwise," Tali replied with a shake of her head, "I can try to help you as best as I can in lessons of conduct, but to be honest, you're better at this than you think. Every interview you had with that harridan, Khalisa Bin Sint Al-Jilani, was perfect. The audience was practically eating out your hand. You turned the opinions of so many and amassed the greatest fighting force throughout the galaxy that no one has ever seen before."

"And the salarian dalatrass?" Shepard asked quietly, staring out at Rannoch's star.

"Shepard, what do you see yourself as?" Tali asked pointedly.

Shepard turned back to look at her. "The woman who fired the Crucible."

Tali sighed heavily and shifted in her chair. "Good, now we're getting somewhere. Garrus and I were with you, Shepard. We didn't stop you."

Shepard lowered her face to her hands and rubbed it. "Even when the geth and EDI are rebooted, they won't be the same as when I took them all offline."

"And what would have been better, allowing for Harbinger to kill all of us?" Tali pushed. "We will reboot them to the best of their ability. It was the geth's choice whether or not to graft Reaper technology onto themselves."

"You sound like you're blaming them," Shepard said quietly, "Is that really wise to do, after everything Legion sacrificed?"

"They hold as much blame as we do," Tali explained, "You know this already – my people mistreated the geth, and it led to us being driven off-world. To wit, even after we've returned," she swiped her hand over her helmeted face for emphasis, "it will take centuries for us to move about and breathe the air as you do. Actions have consequences."

"But no one put me on trial, this time," Shepard's hands clenched over her chair's arms, "Tali, I murdered tens of thousands! I couldn't even look Joker in the eye after I off-lined EDI!"

Tali stood at that. "Is that what you want, then? Okay, Shepard, let's do this." She jammed her finger in her face. "You are the most pitiful human being I've ever had the displeasure of working with! You wear medals on your chest, meanwhile you murdered scores of batarians, and for not 'justice,' but revenge. You act like a diplomat to everyone's face, but you're brutal on the battlefield. You allowed Oleg Petrovsky, a man who slaughtered tens of thousands of Omega residents, to still draw breath. You whine, moan, and complain that you feel awful about killing one race, meanwhile you have probably sentenced us to far worse, what with your awakening the Leviathans, reawakening tensions between the krogans and the salarians, and leaving my people on an unknown plane! We had just barely formed a treaty with the geth when you murdered them all, you bosh'tet!"

Tali paused to catch her breath, and watch Shepard, who at first had looked shocked, slowly glare at her in silence. When Tali opened her mouth again, however, she asked gently, "And did any of that bring Legion back?"

"No."

"Did it bring Thane back?"

"No."

"Did it bring Mordin back?'

"No."

Tali relaxed. "Shepard, while I'm not in your shoes, I can sympathize. You are carrying more on your shoulders than others, and it's easy to buckle under. But you also need to lay the burden down. The Reapers are gone. You have Garrus. You have me. You have friends who adore you. Don't throw that all away, now."

Shepard lowered her gaze. "It would've been easier, had I died in the Citadel."

"But you didn't, and that will be harder," Tali admitted.

"Living the easy life on a tropical island? Not really. I think I just need to buck up," Shepard commented bitterly.

Tali shook her head. "No, don't brush this off. You must live with the decisions that you have made. Doing so will be no small feat." She held out her hand. "Just remember that I'm a ping away. Don't you go missing on me this time."

Shepard took it to grasp firmly. "Wouldn't dream of it."

XXXXXX

True to his word, Garrus found a tropical locale for the two of them to live. The Virgin Islands were quiet, and relaxing. Their house sat on a distant area from town and was built into the grassland. Nearby, however, a footpath led to beach. The bright colors of umbrellas were seen during the day, while at night specks of lights from handheld lanterns dotted the beach.

Rosalind took to walking on the beach early in the morning and watching the sun rise. Sitting down on the sand, and placing her feet in the water, she would close her eyes against the distant roar of the ocean.

Harbinger had roared angrily at her and her two squadmates after they had ascended that elevator. While Sovereign had posed a threat of his own, Harbinger had been more personal, in that he actively sought her out. And for all intents and purposes, Rosalind had hoped that she would never hear his voice again.

She watched a hermit crab stumble along the shore.

"So, at last you have come here, Shepard, and alongside you, the turian and the quarian," he had rumbled.

Tali's engineering skills hadn't been able to force the Crucible to fire. "Something, or someone, is blocking it through interference. Everything is in order here." She had sounded utterly exhausted as she slumped over the control panel. Shepard had bit down on a cry of frustration. There Anderson lay, just before the panel, thinking that all had gone according to plan, and yet this had fallen through.

She'd wanted to shake off the hand Garrus had placed on her shoulder at that, but all the same, she had leaned into the familiarity of his touch. Then the elevator had spontaneously activated, bringing them to the next floor, and the interloper had made himself clear.

Her shotgun in her hands, Shepard had scanned the chamber, which was lit up in a deep red color. Harbinger's hologram floated over them, bathing the room in that glow, and blocking the way to the Crucible's energy coil. Shepard felt as if a great weight was pressing down upon her. Tali and Garrus's heavy footsteps, and their groans of pain, signaled the same.

"This is enough, Harbinger," Shepard said evenly, "We've come together, and have our Crucible. We didn't allow you to divide us."

"Is that so?" The hologram turned to Tali. "What of you, quarian? Will you keep your truce with the geth? What will you say, when you see how many you will kill upon firing this Crucible? They are a part of us now because your people forced their hand."

Tali paused, and then replied, "I will take responsibility for it."

"Because they are nothing more than tools to advance your civilization," the Reaper turned to Garrus, "By contrast, turian, you saw the krogans as the opposite, that they would hold back your society."

"Things change, Harbinger," Garrus replied, his voice strained, "We cured the genophage. The krogan can live now."

"Only because your 'good krogan,' Wrex, proved otherwise. No," the Reaper dismissed, "You three have not changed. We have an ally of convenience," Tali moaned, and put her hands to her head, "and a martyr," Garrus groaned, and fell to one knee from the pain, "following a beacon into oblivion."

Shepard spun to look back at them, and her heart felt seized in a vice as she watched both in the throes of pain. "Stop it!" She yelled, "Leave them alone!"

"They will both testify, as they have followed you the most. Now, quarian!"

Tali gasped and choked. Shepard plodded slowly toward her, unable to force her straining muscles to move more quickly, and her heart pounding out of a fear of Tali's suit possibly having ruptured. "We will rebuild them! The geth are our responsibility! We will learn!" She managed to choke out.

"Folly!" With a strangled gasp, Tali collapsed on the floor, "You learn this lesson from the empty words of a human!" Harbinger roared over Garrus and Shepard calling out Tali's name. She didn't respond, remaining prone on the floor.

"And you, turian, your righteousness is based only on the model of the human woman that you see before you. Can you not learn anything on your own?"

Garrus coughed at that, and half-doubled over. Shepard's eyes burned as she shuffled toward him, her hand outstretched. "I don't claim to know everything," Garrus replied in exhaustion, using his sniper rifle as a crutch to push himself up, his blue eyes locked on Shepard's, "But being flawed isn't a weakness in a species. We aren't meant to be alone. We're meant to learn from others. After all, you're not exactly asking a good turian that question."

Shepard smiled at that.

"On that matter, Shepard," Harbinger dropped his voice in anger, "Your emotional attachments stunt you far too much."

Garrus gasped at that, and crashed to the floor, his sniper rifle clattering down beside him.

"Garrus!" Shepard screamed. Her muscles, however, protested, and her broken suit felt heavy. She fell to her knees.

"So, that is where you are left, Shepard," Harbinger commented, his voice dripping with contempt, "Should you pursue the future, it will only lead to the destruction of what you have worked for."

Shepard swallowed, and forced herself, biting down on screams against pain to turn back to face him, to stand. "Yet you aren't stopping me."

Harbinger paused, and then replied, "Is this what you wish, Shepard? To live, in this uncertain galaxy?"

Shepard felt a searing pain explode in her head. She lowered it, and clutched at it with a hand. In her mind's eye, images burned themselves into it. She saw Earth, reduced to nothing more than a hellscape of perpetual war, with bipedal forms, some she barely recognized as human or batarian, given how ragged and feral they were, fighting brutally over scraps. She saw her own crewmates being hunted like game, and crushed by land vehicles under a burning sky, while the Normandy, a mere husk, was stripped for parts. And she saw Garrus on Omega, gunned down, the Archangel fallen into a pool of his own blood. She'd been too late, and could only listen to the Blue Suns, Eclipse, and Blood Pack bicker over who would get the bounty on his head.

Summoning what little strength she left, she screeched, "Yes!"

"Then so be it! Annihilate yourselves, as you will me!" Harbinger vanished, and the red light died away to be replaced by a sickly blue. Shepard glanced around and took in her surroundings carefully. A tomb, how fitting.

Holding back a sob from the pain, Shepard fired at the power coil. The explosion shook the room, sending her flying backward to land alongside Garrus. She watched, through eyes slit from the pain, as energy pulsed through the coil, and the chamber lit up in a blinding white light. She shut her eyes, unable to watch any longer, and let out a heavy breath. With a mighty roar, the Crucible fired.

Rosalind closed her eyes, and rose, walking away from the shoreline. Then the next thing she would hear was the beeping of her own vitals, and Dr. Chakwas's voice.

Garrus, for his part, found the quiet life to be difficult to settle into. He'd gotten too used to battle while serving alongside Shepard, and in the war against the Reapers, to become re-acclimated to quiet. He'd turned off timers around the house a while ago, for one. For another, the windows were usually covered at night.

His mother's condition was continuing to deteriorate. She forgot his name, which hurt the most. She barely knew Rosalind, and couldn't recall her presence, however her son spent a few nights crying into Rosalind's shoulder over her. Slowly, she forgot Solana's, as well, but remembered his father. Garrus's father had become a shell of his former self, worn down and tired, though any help Garrus offered was immediately turned down. Still, he was careful to count his blessings – his family was alive, after all had been said and done in that damn war, and he and his father were talking again.

Even if Dad still had a stick up his ass.

Rosalind now wore his tribal tattoos proudly on her face. The tattooing process hadn't been difficult, though she had had to deal with a numb face for several hours. Garrus couldn't have been happier when he first saw her with them. There were a few scowls and sneers about her being involved with "some turian," and complaints about her going native, but Rosalind did her best to ignore them. "The problem with people like that is they only see one image. They see the fame after the fact, but you were there for me the entire time, even when someone didn't want to listen. That was what mattered."

Nevertheless, when a communiqué sometimes arrived from Liara about the more venomous of the videos and postings being taken down, Garrus felt a form of relief.

Then there were the difficult times, where it was hard for them to sleep. Rosalind's gaze would occasionally drift to the encroaching twilight. While it ticked down the time to when they would see their first adopted krogan child, it still gave pause.

"What's the matter?" Garrus asked from where he leaned against the doorway into the bathroom.

Spitting into the sink, and lowering her toothbrush, she asked, "What do you mean?"

"You're awfully quiet," he replied, "And you've been off on your own more often."

She shrugged as she put the toothbrush aside. "Just needed time to think."

"Anything in particular?" He asked.

"Just the past." She glanced down at the sink, "I keep seeing it, the Citadel, and the Crucible."

"What keeps you coming back to it, the deaths?"

"Determining whether I'm indoctrinated," her blue eyes flashed up at him in the mirror.

Garrus felt a sinking in his gut as she said that. He himself had had to tangle with that fear. He supposed that there was a term for it, but he did also harbor a fear of that happening, that this was all just a beautiful dream. And if it was such, he found it would be hard for him to wake up.

He started forward. "You're not," he said, his mouth just by her ear, "This is real."

Rosalind's gaze became distant. "The three of us were thrown, like old trash, into the Citadel after reaching the beam."

"Right," Garrus agreed, "Hurt like hell, too. My visor was cracked. I couldn't use it anymore for targeting – the bigger problem was my armor, but it didn't matter to me as much at the time."

Rosalind grasped a hold of that fragment of memory. "What happened after that, though? Harbinger quizzed us on our experiences, and what it all meant."

Despite the fact that he would rather not have recounted such an experience, he did so for her. "Tali was down first out of us. He tried to indoctrinate her. Then he moved onto me. I," he looked down at his hands before collecting himself to continue, "I saw Palaven burning again, more so than before. It was as if the core of the world was imploding. My parents, Solana…" He shook his head. "They were dying in the flames. The Normandy was burning over the planet. Then there you were. Cerberus had lost you, that time. I saw you on the operating table. They were covering your body. That's when I 'woke up,' and could hear someone mumbling your name. Turned out it was me – I was delirious and was reaching for you." And he wouldn't grasp her until a week later, when she had woken from her medically induced coma.

That had been hell. While there were parties thrown, and celebrations held, it felt so hollow to him when he worried over whether she would wake up again.

"I want to believe it," her fist clenched by her side, "I want to know that everything will be all right – that I won't wake up in that rubble, bleeding to death."

He felt frustration at that, as there wasn't much else he could convince her with – she could see her own scars in the mirror. In fact, he'd walked in on her looking at them a few times in the past.

"I want to go outside." She moved past him at that and into the corridor without waiting on a reply. She was illuminated in the bluish light of the half-moon, which shone through as she lifted the curtain over the glass door to the back deck. Garrus had worked with Zaeed on installing bullet-proof glass to it and was still waiting on that motion sensor the old merc had promised him. Considering after they'd had their last conversation, Zaeed had been headed for England for some quality time with Karin Chakwas and a bottle of hard liquor, he'd probably be waiting a bit longer.

Rosalind slid the door open, and padded onto the deck, Garrus following. She'd once joked that they could go out naked at night if they wanted, as no one lived closely enough to see them. He hadn't yet taken her up on that and made a mental note to look into it another time.

Rosalind was quiet as she stared out the field, the grass whispering with the wind. The ocean whispered against the shore.

"You know," she commented, "Looking for you on Menae scared the hell out of me. There were so many covered bodies…It seems selfish now, but as I passed them, I thought that each one could have been you."

A chill ran down his spine at that. "And I said that I was hard to kill," Garrus commented, "Might have been insensitive at the time. Just wanted to break the tension."

"Was that what it was like for you on Omega, when you saw me again?"

"Yes."

She looked back at that. "We're a mess, aren't we?"

"To be fair, no one told me that I was going to nearly lose my then-future wife more times than I care to admit now," he said, rubbing the back of his neck, "But to be honest, it's the rare occasion that we aren't a mess, anyway."

Rosalind tapped her fingers on the wood. "I talked to Tali on Rannoch about taking the geth and EDI offline. Could I ask you a question about that?"

"Of course."

"You told me once that you'd question my decisions if I didn't take the lives of others into account first. What made you change your mind?"

"The Terminus Systems, for one. I know that they changed you, as well," Garrus pointed out. In retrospect, it was little wonder that they finally did cross from friends to lovers while there. Sex and violence were a common interplay. "But more to the point, C-Sec was different from war. I only knew civil service then."

There were the memories that he would keep to himself, of the nights on Omega where he dreamed of Rosalind coming to his bedside, sometimes accusing him, but on others forgiving him for not being able to save her. Broken dreams from a life that he would never have again.

And then he saw her through the scope of his sniper rifle…He'd nearly fired a shot in shock. She'd risen from the grave.

She nodded. "So now what? I take up some hobbies?"

"Only if you want to." He paused. "Do you want to wait a few years until the adoption? We can talk to Wrex."

Rosalind lowered her eyes. "I don't know how long I'll have to put it off."

"Hey," he gently ran his hand over her back, "there's no pressure. Even if we don't, that's fine." She looked up, and he said, "I'm not with you just for having children, you know that."

She moved toward him, and he moved his hand to put his arm around her. "Give me one more year to get my feet on the ground, and then we'll talk."

"We'll talk to Wrex tomorrow." Garrus brushed his fingers over her waist. "I'll remind you that you're still here, as many times as you need."

"Thank you." She leaned her head against his shoulder.

"Always, sweetheart."

**Author's Note:**

> So a few things here:
> 
> While I did want go more into what Shepard's decisions would have affected, as far as the galaxy at large, I wanted to focus on the personal matters of how the events of Mass Effect 3 would have affected her. Similarly to my previous fanfic, "Troublemaker," my Shepard is a paragrade who had a colonist/war hero background.
> 
> My take on the ending is as follows: Shepard takes Tali and Garrus with her to the Citadel, and argues with Harbinger, as opposed to the Starchild, who does not exist in this fic's continuity. Rather than focusing on organics vs. synthetics, the Reapers, by my interpretation, are more focused on keeping order in the galaxy as they see fit. They would have been built as wardens by the Leviathans, and eventually turned against them due to the Leviathans shackling them. Shepard uniting the races against them, however, is an unprecedented variable - Harbinger, and by extension, the Reaper fleet, realizes that a concession is needed. The galaxy is united against the Reapers, therefore the Reapers must bow out, otherwise all major space-faring sentient life will need to be eliminated.
> 
> The Crucible is still fired, and the Reapers are eliminated. The geth and EDI are also off-lined as a result of the Reaper technology being grafted onto them, but they are eventually rebooted. The Reaper remains are then studied. No Starchild, no cycles, no synthetic vs. organic issue. Mass relays remain online.


End file.
